Topics

16

Open Feedback / OpenXCom and hqx scaler

« on: November 09, 2010, 01:58:37 pm »

Hi,
this is just an open discussion following on greyhound's blog comment.

Hqx is the only scaler I have experience with, it's fast, opensource and easy to implement (1 single class). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hqx)
There is another widely used one called 2xSAI, which seems to do the job very nice as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2xsai_example.png

In openXcom it can scale raster graphics immediatly after loading them, so there is no scaling going on during the game itself, in contrary to the pixel-stretching it is now doing, which will drastically increase framerate at higher resolutions. Downside is that the scaling is fixed to either 2x 3x or 4x.

But this ofcourse only applies to raster graphics and not to vector graphics like the globe and the user interface elements, which have to be scaled in a mathematical way.

In attachement a preview of what hq3x does in comparison with the standard stretcher set to 960x600.
PS. it's faked, the hq3x is applied after the screenshot, but it's just to get an idea

17

Programming / Improved globe performance when zoomed in

« on: October 30, 2010, 01:50:21 pm »

Adding two lines of code (to not draw text labels that are not on the screen), more than doubles the framerate when zoomed in.


Also you may want to do the same check in the cachePolygons function. The performance increase is amazing. But I don't want to do all the work for you :p

18

Programming / Battlescape development

« on: October 14, 2010, 01:37:59 pm »

Some may know already that I have started battlescape development for openxcom. Independently from SupSuper's geoscape development atm, and not (yet) committing into SVN.
You can always ask me on IRC how this is progressing, but I'm not there all the time, so I decided to post my progress here for these curious people.

milestone 1 - done
I started with a design, threw the design far away and started coding.

milestone 2 - done
First new class I created is the BattlescapeState. This is where all the action takes place. It divides in 2 main parts, the "_map" part and the "_icons" part. Map, another new class, is an interactice surface which is the viewport to the battle map. Icons... well, the icons And then lots of interactive surfaces, one for each button. The abort button stops the battlescapestate. The battlescape state starts when pressing the ufopaedia button on the geoscape. (just for quickly testing the battlescape state of course)

milestone 3 - todo:
- review code of previous milestone
- create SavedBattleGame class (the pointer is held by SavedGame) which  holds a set of Tiles
- using XcomRuleset certain .MAP files are loaded into the set of tiles, (depending on terrain, mapsize, mission,...)
- proper terrain PCKs (tilesheets) are loaded
- the Map is drawn.
- post a screenshot in this thread